Post navigation

Summer Love

Henry James once said that the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon.” Not bad, but I would say “summer reading.” Each June, when the school year ends and the days lengthen, I start to collect my friends for the warm months ahead. It’s a time of hope and passionate resolutions: Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma in the original French, that Yale Younger Poets winner, the cascading chapters of Middlemarch, a tennis biography, something on the Founding Fathers. I swear to myself that I will get through it all; this year will be different.

Gari Melchers, “Lady Reading” (1910)

Of course, by the end of August, I will have only finished a fraction of these pages. Read and unread, the pile rests on my living room table all summer, the perfect backdrop for the season. We can daydream and make big unrealizable plans when it’s cold…